As demand grows for mobile phone applications, research in optical
character recognition, a technology well developed for scanned
documents, is shifting focus to the recognition of text embedded in
digital photographs. In this paper, we present OCRdroid, a generic
framework for developing OCR-based applications on mobile
phones. OCRdroid combines a light-weight image preprocessing suite
installed inside the mobile phone and an OCR engine connected to a
backend server. We demonstrate the power and functionality of this
framework by implementing two applications called PocketPal and
PocketReader based on OCRdroid on HTC Android G1 mobile
phone. Initial evaluations of these pilot experiments demonstrate
the potential of using OCRdroid framework for real-world OCR-based
mobile applications.